An improved Top Navigation – Giving easy access to collaboration features

Streamlined Side Bar Navigation – Separating the wiki pages from the collaboration features.

Customized Home wiki page – implicitly explaining how the wiki is used as a base for team collaboration.

Now let’s go through the process of creating this template.

Step 1: Create a wiki site.

No mystery here. If you have Site Creation permissions, go to: (for sub-sites) View All Site Content/Sites and Workspaces/Create, or (for top-level sites) Site Directory/Create Site. Choose the Wiki Site template.

Step 2: Create the standard Collaboration Team Site Lists

Go to View All Site Content.

You will notice that the wiki site does not have any of the standard collaboration libraries or lists. To create these features click Create and create a Shared Documents, Links, Calendar, Contacts List, and Tasks List.

After you are done, your Site Content list should look like this.

Step 3: Alter the site Navigation

Next, the site navigation needs to be cleaned up in order to remove confusion on how the features interact with each other. To do this we first need to hide the Quick Launch by:

Click Site Actions

Click Tree View under the Look and Feel header.

Remove the check mark from the Enable Quick Launch box.

Now the Team Collaboration Lists that we’ve created are going to be exposed in the Top Navigation to give them context within the site and to make these features easily accessible. To do this:

Click Site Actions

Click Top Link Bar under the Look and Feel header.

Add the links to the Collaboration Lists (Shared Documents, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks) by clicking New Link.

After this task is complete, the top navigation bar of the site should look like this.

Step 4: Pre-populate the wiki with default pages to spur and define usage of the wiki

The final step in creating the Wiki Collaboration Team Site is to add some pre-built pages to the site in-order to promote the use of and give guidance on how the site should be used as a collaboration site. To do this:

Go to View All Site Content

Click the Wiki Pages Library and create a new page. Or, you can click the “Home” page, edit the contents, and type [[New Page Name]]. This will create a new page for each [[ ]] you type.

After you are done the wiki page library should look like this.

Now go into each wiki page and alter the content. The content will define what the page is used. The following screen shots show how I altered each page. Notice that I’ve linked the pages together using the wiki [[title]] syntax, but have also embedded links to the collaboration lists as well to provide additional context and functionality.

In my template, I included pages for the following: General Training, New Hire Information, System Support, Team Vision Mission, and Tools.

General Training

Home

New Hire Information

System Support

Team Vision & Mission

Tools

So that’s it. We now have a fully functional wiki based collaborative team site that looks like this.

Step 5: Creating a Site Template

So I’m not going to walk through the steps for creating a site template. If you want to learn more about this, you can find the instructions here.

However, if you just want to download my template and use that as a starting point, you can click here.

Summary

Though this site doesn’t look dramatically different than the out-of-the-box wiki site template, the small enhancements that were made greatly improve the end user experience and should help convince wiki users that the SharePoint wiki is actually an enhancement not a hindrance. In summary:

By using the wiki site template as a base, the main focus of the site is the wiki instead of the wiki being a secondary list or resource.

By removing the Quick Launch bar and moving the collaborative lists to the Top Navigation, end users are provided with a streamlined look and feel that promotes easy use of the wiki pages as well as the lists.

By pre-building some wiki pages end users are implicitly given context on how the wiki site is supposed to be used.

By pre-building some wiki pages end users are also shown that wiki pages will not only give them dynamic information but links to other collaborative resources (e.g.: shared documents, contacts, etc.).

Though not shown here, the site can further be enhanced by using the web part zones on each page.